Yezid Sayigh | Can Syria Stay Solvent?

MESOP TODAY’S ANALYSIS : SOLVENT OR NOT SOLVENT – THAT’S THE QUESTION HERE

Sayigh is a senior associate at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, where his work focuses on the Syrian crisis, the political role of Arab armies, security sector transformation in Arab transitions, the reinvention of authoritarianism, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and peace process.

Although none of its foes has the ability to bring it down, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is likely, in 2015, to face its toughest challenges since the Syrian crisis started nearly four years ago. This may compel the regime to engage seriously with one or another of the diplomatic initiatives launched by various parties at the end of 2014—but that is a remote prospect—or else experience increasingly significant cracks within the ranks of its own social and institutional constituencies.The regime is already struggling to keep afloat financially, but the deepening economic difficulties of its staunchest external allies, Russia and Iran, are set to intensify in 2015, making them more likely to curtail than to increase their assistance. This will have knock-on effects for the regime’s ability to absorb growing discontent within loyalist constituencies. These outcomes are caught between sharp rises in the cost of living, exhaustion of savings, and a lack of secure opportunities for investment on the one hand, as well as the regime’s declining ability to support the national currency’s exchange rate and real wages in the public sector on the other. Regime forces are already badly stretched, but societal discontent limits its ability to generate further combat manpower to meet the looming threat of the Islamic State, an increasingly assertive al-Qaeda wing known as the Nusra Front, and more effective moderate rebels in the south.

The question is whether the worsening economic circumstances of Russia and Iran will prompt them to lessen their burden in Syria, by pushing the Assad regime much harder to make substantive concessions toward a political transition. Or, failing that, to commit to UN Special Envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura’s proposal to “freeze” the conflict in Aleppo as a first step toward a political dialogue, which the United States and the European Union have endorsed. The time may be coming when the regime’s loyalist constituencies demand engagement with one of these initiatives and no longer take no for an answer. http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=57610&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRolu6nKZKXonjHpfsX57eQkXaCg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YABRcp0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D